


i'll have a good go at it

by sullypants



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Sexuality, but no actual sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:41:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23569255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sullypants/pseuds/sullypants
Summary: She doesn’t really start to think aboutit, until after the second timeithappens.(She shouldn’t call itit. If she’s having it, she can and should call it sex, she tells herself.)
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 50
Kudos: 95
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	i'll have a good go at it

_Betty has sex._

_Betty is a person who has had sex._

_Betty is having sex._

_Betty va a tener sexo._

  
  
  
  
  
  


Senora Hernandez is interrupted by the final bell sooner than Betty is expecting. With a jerk she realizes she has spent ( _she had spent_ ), the full fifty minutes of Spanish 3 Honors—and much of the rest of the school day before it—thinking about this new reality.

Or... _whatever_.

She does not feel different. She hadn’t even felt different after she’d gotten home that night, but then—there really was no time to mull it over. 

Something had popped up, and sucked all the air out of the room for over a week.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She doesn’t really start to think about _it_ , until after the second time _it_ happens. 

(She shouldn’t call it _it_. If she’s having it, she can and should call it sex, she tells herself.)

The second time it happens, she isn’t as surprised. The first had been, she decides, a happy accident. She missed Jughead. She missed _working_ with Jughead, their camaraderie.

She missed being _we_. 

And so that moment had been twofold—they were together again; they were having sex. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


_It_ is different from anything she’s felt by herself. 

Finding that feeling herself had been a hard-earned, slow-build process (she sees the irony). 

Betty has an intrinsic understanding of shame, but it’s a blind spot she’s not aware of having. She’s carried shame for a long time, like a weighted cloak unseen by others and never forgotten by herself.

The shame doesn’t become a thing she thinks of as suspect until she’s twelve. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s not until Polly is allowed to start dating, as a fourteen year old freshman, that Betty starts to think differently.

The understanding goes hand-in-hand with the realization that her parents are fallible. 

Betty starts to feel like she’s outgrown her Nancy Drew and Tracy True books. She borrows a short and squat book from Polly’s bookshelf, and then another, and then one more. They’re slight in both physical heft and literary substance. They smell like newsprint; they leave black smudges of ink on her fingertips. 

She devours each book in a single sitting, returns them to Polly’s shelf knowing her sister would be none the wiser.

(When Betty is older she’ll think differently again; she’ll consider Polly’s feigned cluelessness as sisterly kindness.)

  
  
  
  
  
  


The first time, it’s a return to the status quo.

Since they’d broken up, she’d lost more than just a person she loved. It was like she and Jughead no longer had what made their relationship feel different. 

Sometimes she felt like she could read his mind, like she could look in his eyes and know what he was thinking before he said it out loud.

And then that was gone. 

There were still glimpses of it. But more often than not, Jughead avoided her eyes. He walked in the opposite direction when he saw her coming down the hall. He sat next to Kevin at their lunch table, and the space next to her sat empty. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


He asks her to _stay_ , and she meets his eye. They move as one, they decide together. 

She has never felt more vulnerable than she does when she tells him she wants him ( _she’s wanted him for months_.)

  
  
  
  
  
  


The second time, she goes to the trailer to study for her trig exam, on a night she knows Mr. Jones is out. 

She’s not kidding herself. She has an idea of what she wants, and she’s told herself it’s okay to ask for what she wants, to desire what she wants. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


This line of thinking is a more recent development. 

She thinks she’s benefited from her friendship with Veronica in innumerable ways, but her best friend’s frankness on the topic of sex has certainly been educational. 

Veronica does not exhibit shame when she talks with Betty about her past experiences, even those she deems as subpar, or unpleasant, or even embarrassing. 

Veronica is resilient. She speaks of her experiences with an honesty that Betty finds refreshing, having grown up under Alice Cooper’s thumb.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Betty did not receive what she would call a sex talk.

In fifth grade, Riverdale Elementary had sent her home with a permission slip in hand. It was a normal eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of printer paper, but Alice looked at it much like she had the jury summons she’d received in the mail the previous year. 

She’d nonetheless signed it, handed it back to Betty, and then led Betty to her own bedroom. 

She sat Betty down on the king-size bed, sitting gingerly next to her, placing her palms between her knees.

“Betty, you understand what sex is, right?”

Betty had nodded. 

(Betty had some ideas; she’d seen movies, and noted the moments her mother told her to cover her eyes had certain consistencies. 

When she could get away with it, she’d also tag along with Polly and her friends, and tried to be as small and inconspicuous as possible. She’d overheard some things.)

Alice made a noise of agreement at the back of her throat. She nodded, eyeing her daughter as though Betty had said something very wise, before continuing.

“Well, it’s something only adults do. It’s not something you should do until you get married. Do you understand?”

Betty had her suspicions—this did not track with the plots of some of those movies—but she also knew that now was one of those moments where she had to be agreeable towards her mother. 

Sometimes her mother got angry if Betty talked back, told her not to be fresh. Since this was a topic that Alice saw as fraught enough to pull her aside in this fashion, Betty merely nodded. 

Alice had patted her shoulder, and sent her to finish her homework before dinner. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


But then Polly had gone away. Then she and Jughead had hunted Polly down. She’d learned Polly’s secrets; she’d learned her mother’s secrets. 

She learned—slowly, and very deliberately—to feel a little differently about how she felt, and what she thought, and how she _felt_. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


She didn’t expect Jughead. 

She’d planned for Archie. She _thought_ she had planned for Archie. But then Archie had done the most Archie-like thing possible and seemingly tripped on his own feet. 

She starts to think that this is what people mean when they tell you life doesn’t always happen the way you expect. It sounds horribly cliche. 

But, she supposes, cliches become cliches for a reason. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


The second time, she’s on that couch in the trailer again, textbook in lap, and Jughead sits on the floor, his back against the couch. 

Her ankle is in his palm, and she can’t focus on her notes because he’s methodically stroking his thumb across her ankle bone ( _malleolus_ , she thinks, even though Human Anatomy was last year.) He turns the page of his textbook with his other hand. 

She’s a little annoyed that he can focus on studying. This is unfair, she thinks. Does he not want her like she wants him?

But then she remembers herself, _tells_ herself that’s foolish. Jughead loves her. She told him she wanted him, and he’d turned out to want her, too. 

Rejection is always a possibility, but it isn’t a reason not to try something, she thinks.

She closes her textbook with a snap that makes him jump, turning his head to look at her. She slides down to sit next to him on the floor, props her chin on her knee.

“Juggie, you still have those condoms, right?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Still—it’s not always the easiest thing, she finds: initiating. 

It’s lucky then, that Jughead seems to initiate as much as she does.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She’s not lying when she tells him she brought her outfit to distract him from his sleuthing. 

But there’s also something she’d discovered during those few short weeks she’d taken Chic’s advice and begun camming. 

It’s nice, pretending you’re someone else. 

Other people aren’t Coopers, and aren’t held to all the expectations that entails. 

Other people don’t have a fracturing family. Other people don’t cover up murders. 

Other people get what they want. 

You can’t completely hide yourself, there’s always the smallest flame of self-hood that stays alit, but only the people who truly know you can perhaps see it. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


(She knows she’s lucky that Jughead seems to want it, too. She doesn’t like to think about what that rejection might have felt like.)

  
  
  
  
  
  


She gets now that this was what Kevin might have been talking about when he tried to defend his rendezvous in Fox Forest. _Sort of_ —she knows she’s a cisgender, straight (... _ish?_ ), white female, that her existence is fundamentally different from Kevin’s. 

There’s something to be said for going at a desire from the side.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Still. 

She’s learning, through lived experience, what feels good and what doesn’t. She’s trying very hard to be honest. 

She’s trying to meet Jughead in the middle. 

Sometimes he seems fearless to her. She knows his fears and his vulnerabilities, and she also knows that these are things he’s shown very few others. She doesn’t take that privilege lightly. 

He’s so _open_ about desiring her. He makes it easy to reciprocate. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Can I turn the light on?”

Betty’s quiet, and she feels the weight of the silence in the room. She shifts her shoulder, moves so she’s putting less weight on it. 

“I just want to _see_ you.” He enunciates the word, like he’s trying to underline it in the air. “I always want to see you.”

She purses her lips. 

“You know I—and I know this doesn’t mean from me what it means from, I don’t know, _yourself_ —but…” He seems to think, to search the air for what he wants to say, and she finds herself holding her breath, and then he finds it. “I think you’re fucking gorgeous.”

Betty watches him silently, and he continues.

“There’s nothing about you I don’t want to know or see.”

Her eyes fall somewhere south of his jaw. She picks at the hem of his pillowcase. 

He grins at her, in a way she might label bashful in another setting. When she’s silent, he continues. 

“I think I sort of...thought that was what the wig was about.” 

Betty flushes.

“Yes,” she nods. “Well—part of it.”

Jughead raises his eyebrows and nods his head slowly, his gaze hazy and aimed over her shoulder. 

“Well let me know if you want to talk about the other part,” he says gently. 

Betty looks up, meets his eyes. He’s not smiling, but she can see a grin in how he looks at her. She nods her head. 

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay,” he responds. 

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a prompt from [@loveleee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee) ( _Hey, who turned out the lights?_ and _I just want to look at you._ ) 
> 
> But also inspired by [@dorian/burberrycanary's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorian_burberrycanary/pseuds/dorian_burberrycanary) [I Leave This at Your Ear.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12642993) You should read that.
> 
> Title is from Jason Molina's Farewell Transmission. 
> 
> With thanks to [@sabrinas1d](https://sabrinas1d.tumblr.com/) for translation help.
> 
> Thanks for reading.


End file.
